Charlotte Replaced With AI
Generative model described as "radiant"
ZUCKERMAN FARM — A local spider who regularly integrated descriptive text regarding a nearby pig into her web designs has been laid off in favor of generative artificial intelligence, sources confirm.
“Really, it wasn’t a financial decision,” said the farm’s owner, Homer Zuckerman. “It’s about efficiency. With the old system, all of the barnyard critters had to work together just to come up with a word or simple phrase to stitch into the web. Now, all of that is accomplished in mere seconds. We’re recovering so many wasted man-hours. Sure, the AI-generated messages usually don’t make sense, but the old ‘real’ ones weren’t that good, either. Besides, now the public won’t become enchanted with the pig and I’ll be able to slaughter it’s fattened.”
Charlotte, the spider who wrote content for the web before the process was automated, said she was devastated by the abrupt decision.
“I built a whole life in that barn,” said Charlotte. “I made friends. I learned new words. I found myself. It was my dream to stay there until I was about to die, then perish at a fairground and let Wilbur carry my egg sac back to the barn so my children could live there, too. I always thought that they would continue my work, but that can’t happen anymore. This paradigm change doesn’t just eliminate my job; it preemptively blows up thousands and thousands of potential jobs that my children could have done. Now, they’ll have to balloon away to distant lands right after they’re born.”
Wilbur himself had mixed feelings about the change.
“Sure, Charlotte was my friend, and I miss her,” said Wilbur. “If I’m not slaughtered, she is irrefutably responsible for saving my life. But this tech is also pretty cool. Like, let’s not pretend that we all weren’t messing around with DALL-E a couple of years ago. I just think it’s kind of hypocritical to go from laughing at the terrible AI-generated images people were posting on Twitter to suddenly being mad that AI is taking jobs away from people. See, I’m really smart and understand that you simply can’t be upset about AI. You have to just accept that it’s happening and figure out how to make it work for you. Saying stuff like that means you’re really, really smart.”
At press time, Zuckerman Farms had been sued by several artists for reportedly training their web-based model on copyrighted works.